Women to Bishops:
We will reject your anti-RH candidates
By Democratic Socialist
Women of the Philippines (DSWP)
July 27, 2012
QUEZON CITY – Following the
Roman Catholic hierarchy's pronouncements that they will make a list
of anti-reproductive health (RH) bill candidates that they will
support for the coming 2013 elections, a group of women working in
grassroots communities welcomed the move saying that it will even help
them know the candidates to reject and not vote for.
The Democratic Socialist
Women of the Philippines (DSWP), a national federation of 264
community women’s organizations with 40,000 members chaired by
Elizabeth Angsioco is not threatened by this announcement and in fact,
fully supports it.
She added, “the move is good
for RH champions as non-inclusion in the bishops’ list means that they
favor saving mothers from dying and adolescent girls from untimely
pregnancies.”
"The bishops will make our
work easier. Inclusion in their list is a guarantee that a candidate
is anti-RH. For women, especially those in poor communities such as
our members, being anti-RH is being anti-women and anti-poor. With the
bishops' list, we will no longer need to do further research on
included candidates. We will simply campaign against and NOT vote for
them", Angsioco stressed.
However, Angsioco explained,
that such move is just an empty threat from the bishops because it has
been proven from past elections that the Catholic block vote is at
best, a myth.
Angsioco recalls that the
Catholic church openly went against former Presidents Fidel Ramos and
Erap Estrada, as well as former Senator Juan Flavier but all of them
won the elections.
She added, “Even at the
local level, priests went against champions of the RH bill but
virtually all of those re-electionists won. In contrast, during the
2010 elections, anti-RH candidates at the national level who said that
they had the bishops' support, lost, and lost miserably. The Catholic
church has never proven that it has a block vote unlike the Iglesia ni
Cristo.”
Angsioco explained further
that all credible surveys done through a number of years by Social
Weather Stations and Pulse Asia have all proven that the Filipino
people overwhelmingly support a government-funded family planning
program as well as the passage of the RH bill. “Even Catholics support
these because 81% to 94% of total respondents of these surveys
identified themselves as Catholic. The fact is, it is only the Roman
Catholic hierarchy and those closely allied to it that are rabidly
against the RH bill,” Angsioco ended.